Conversions: Whose Job Is It Anyway?

I just presented the keynote at the European Conversion Summit in Frankfurt, Germany. It was the best attended conversion-oriented conference I’ve attended to date. In a discussion with the conference organizer, André Morys, about the number and backgrounds of the people attending, André apologized that Germany was at least two years behind the United States. Baloney! I told him I couldn’t agree and that I was very impressed with the number and quality of people in attendance.

Nevertheless, I told André the biggest obstacles his conference and his company face when focusing on conversion. How many people in the room actually have “conversion” in their title? For search conferences, you have directors and managers of search; PPC managers. At social media conferences, you have those whose titles include social media or community. At web analytics conferences, you have marketing analysts.

E-commerce managers may be responsible for revenue; merchandisers for the product selection and presentation; user experience and development teams for the experience; and analytics for measurement, but it’s unclear who owns the crucial multi-disciplinary function of conversion.

I have seen a handful of companies with individuals who have conversion in their title but they are quite rare. In those companies that do, their conversion people have access to tools and resources that demonstrate a very different corporate metabolism than those that don’t have them. These companies are also passionate about being customer focused and data driven, testing continuously, understanding lifetime value, and are quick to act. Most companies aren’t structured to make conversions a core responsibility. They may assign “conversions” to the PPC manager or even the director of analytics, but they only look at it from their narrow vertical and they aren’t given the resources needed to gather the insights, to create and modify landing pages, and to set up personalization and go beyond landing pages into complex testing of customer paths.

An Econsultancy study found that 48 percent of companies do not think they have direct control over conversion. In fact, this is why most companies spend about $92 to drive visitor traffic but less than $1 to convert them.

When my brother Jeffrey and I first began evangelizing for conversion optimization in the late 1990s, most companies had dreams of the “new economy” and accompanying fantasies of “eyeballs” being the most important metric; we naively saw this as a C-suite responsibility. Today, most organizations have many people responsible for driving traffic but virtually no one responsible for converting that traffic into revenue. In the offline world’s equivalent, there is an executive responsible for sales (conversions) and an executive responsible for marketing, but online marketers have no counterpart.

We do know how and why this responsibility has escaped the C-suite’s notice – they don’t understand that they can control conversion. How else can you explain the average e-commerce conversion rate at 3 percent while market leaders consistently convert 15 percent and upwards?

The C-suite doesn’t know how to get their organizations there, and there aren’t really a lot of people out there with the skills and experience to train departments to become masters of the various disciples required of conversion optimization. Most are afraid to raise their hands and ask the right questions out of fear of demonstrating ignorance. It isn’t all their fault.

Online success and the meteoric growth rate the online channel has enjoyed masked the need to “grok” conversion. But as today’s paid traffic experiences cost inflation and as traffic continues to fragment with the growth of social media channels, companies are coming to the realization that conversions can’t be ignored.

For all that’s being written about various marketing strategies, success in e-business, as in any business, isn’t about marketing or about design; it’s about sales.

Ultimately, it’s about the conversion rate: the percentage of visitors your site can turn into buyers. Lots of dot-coms have turned into dot-bombs because even though they spent tons of money on “sexy” designs and tons more driving traffic to their sites, they overlooked the tiny fact that they needed to sell to visitors once they arrived at the site. The sad thing is, many of those visitors would have bought happily and could have left delighted.

Many struggling dot-coms would be successful if they woke up to e-sales, and many failed dot-coms would still be around if they had done the same. Don’t get me wrong. Marketing is an essential part of the e-commerce equation. Marketing paves the way for sales. But it’s only where sales and marketing overlap that buying happens.

Are conversions and sales your job? If so, please introduce yourself.

If not, what are you doing to increase your conversion rates, and do you wish your company would and could do more? Please let me know in the comments below.

Hi Bryan, your head on on this. I wonder it myself together with everyone selling tools, training or services. Maybe getting some data from these conferences would help on the targeting the market, wonder if its out there. Job title as part of registration to make sure we all target the right people.

On the other hand, there is still a lot of work to be done. Every year you read “this year the year of CRO? ” and its not taking off as fast as SEO has done. I guess we have not hit the critical mass of agencies offering CRO as a service yet.

I think its the great combination for an agency adding value to there existing portfolio and educating the market. I see more shout outs on A/B testing then conversion in my twitter stats, I guess we have to target our education (or as Raquel with her new ConversionGame) games on that to conversion is the mission and A/B testing is a tool.

Nice that that its at the beginning of the curve, now create that hockey stick graph of conversion, up and to the right 🙂

Dennis,
After pushing on this rope for over a decade, I am still not certain we are at the beginning of the curve. You can read my thoughts about why this isn’t the year of CRO at http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1716832/is-2010-year-conversion-rate-optimization. However, I think part of the problem is the current set of tools still make it rather hard to get thinks done. From complex setups of analytics solutions to difficult to execute testing solutions. Hopefully, as the next generation of tools – like Monetate come around in popularity things will start to really change.

John I completely agree. When Jeffrey and I decided to settle on the tagline for our company in 1998 we decided on using the term “conversion rate” in it because it was the only one with any kind of search volume (limited) but it had some.

Great article. Doesn’t help when senior management love this stuff, but don’t give the seniority or authority to cut across business divisions in the pursuit of optimisation.

I’m dead lucky at my work, because they’ll let me roam outside the web (in cross channel design, many problems exist offline or in the interactions between the two). I’ve got the authority, the remit but guess what my job title is (laughs) – Customer Experience Manager.

Outside of my area though – I’ve done two roundtables for Econsultancy so listened to over 50 people about their CRO programmes or personal work. Not a single one of these people has conversion, optimisation or remotely similar in their job title.

I then went searching on Linkedin and found one person – Mike from Vegas.com – who is presenting at eMetrics London in November. He is the only person who I can recall having a job title.

The one interesting insight I can add is that with those 50 people, the overwhelming change from 2010 to 2011, is that now people are saying ‘we need people who are experts in this area’ to be hired (as consultants or employees) in order to realise benefits from the tools they’d bought.

I’d say that many of these companies are coming out of the ‘trough of disillusionment’ with hastily applied technologies (with the help of many optimisers). I’m optimistic at least *we* will be taking this stuff to the board, every time and generating industry knowledge. At least if these companies are investing more in talent, it might get more airtime, promotion and the true recognition it deserves – in job title, budget and a seat on the board.

Craig you are my conversion hero. I am looking forward to spending more time with you in London. I agree that the demand for knowledge has picked up and I see that in the certification courses with my curriculum offered by http://www.marketmotive.com and http://www.whichtestwon.com. My concern is all the people who suffer through trying to learn from pseudo-experts out there, or those that have some expertise in one narrow focus of conversion optimization. Most people just don’t do the homework required to evaluate the differences. Still the seo and social media courses are in greater demand that the conversion one.

Nice article Bryan. I think testing and conversion optimization is often more effective as a shared discipline across multiple marketing functions. I liked your data from Indeed.com, but I would be interested in how many times “conversion optimization” or “testing and optimization” appears inside the job descriptions, but not necessarily the job titles.

Love your reprint of the 2001 Clickz article Bryan that indicates how things have not changed much in ten years. I do not know who recommended Jakob Nielsen book from 2001 on ecommerce user experience to me (maybe you?) I just received it and It will likely be the best $150 dollars I have ever spent despite it’s age.

You are right not many think this way. It is so fundamental. I am graduating with a BS in Internet Marketing next month so glad I read this. I think I will specialize in conversions. Right now I do video marketing and video SEO. I think video drives conversions on a website more than any other element could. Do you agree, Bryan?

I believe the main reason CRO isn’t attributed a job title is because you can’t really offer an employee 8 hours per day 5 days per week and a good paycheck just for CRO.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s essential and people don’t seem to understand the difference between having a 1% rate of conversions and a 2%. It’s freaking double the revenue! And this just by doing some fine tuning.

But the thing is that there isn’t really that much to be done to work full time on this aspect (at least in-house). Instead, having an SEO or PPC Manager that knows CRO is a win.

Bryan, you nailed this one! Thirty One Years ago when I created my first DRTV campaign for a client, I thought it was my job to make the phone ring… and my client’s job to Convert the lead to a sale. Boy was I wrong. I quickly realized I was going to have to learn how to consult and even more importantly create Sales Conversion systems on the back end.

While the Inbound Call Center was the darling intake method for leads back in 1980, rather than the Web form / Web Sales Funnel, the result was the same. We generated leads hand over fist using TV back then, and in fact greatly improved the client’s Cost Per Lead Metric by 300% (We cut their lead cost from $100 to $25) by simply paying attention to Good Marketing Basics (101 stuff). The Client was estactic and I was a hero. I told them… NOT SO FAST…. we haven’t closed the loop (sale) yet on the back end. The fast and hard influx of Leads was enough to make the founder of this Land Development company invest heavily in TV. That was the Good news. The bad news… Indeed I was right. This tremendous improvement in the Cost Per Lead had nothing to do with lowering their customer acquisition cost or Cost per Sale or Sales at all! In fact, the influx of leads into the pipeline from TV in greater numbers than their small sales team could begin to handle, meant only a slight improvement to Cost Per Sale. I’ll spare you the details but their conversion rates actually dropped slightly because leads were so plentiful and the sales team got fot, dumb and happy. Ownership of the company took NO responsibility or interest in the Actual Lead to Sales conversion process and the analysis I had prepared to show the true impact of their very first TV campaign under my direction. Fast Forward to today, that client is now a MUCH LARGER Client and our Media buys have expaned from Traditional Media to many marketing tools in the New Media Tool box. However, with the exception of automation and technology enabled marketing, not much has changed. My client is still enamored with our ability to generate leads lead leads. Ownership and Upper Management give the Sales Managers in the field way too much autonomy and flexibility in Converting Sales and not enough Accountability to the Sales Conversion process. Thank god the Leads are still flowing . That part is still easy as the client does leave us to do what we do best, generate leads. In the meantime, I have come to accept that as a Direct Response Marketer I am not only in the LEad Generation business, but out of necessity in the Land Sales business as we continue to help our client find ways to improve their conversion process (shout out to Salesforce.com).

Amen, Amen, and Amen! My background has ALWAYS been in sales. Since I was a young kid I’ve been a salesman: little league baseball fundraisers, high school baseball orange sales to raise money for stadium lights, selling rain ponchos at college football games – I believe SALES IS WHERE IT’S AT!

I also believe that new business owners in the online world often times look beyond the mark. They want crafty design, they want traffic, they want placement at the top of Google – but it’s not very often that they talk about conversion. It’s like their afraid to even go there.

A nice looking site may help with sales, but it’s not the end all cure all answer. Rankings at the top of Google for what I call “Browser Phrases” won’t get you sales either.

Thanks for this great reminder about the importance of sales in a business person’s online “marketing” efforts.

[…] Conversions: Whose Job Is It Anyway? Bryan Eisenberg asks: Who owns conversions in your organization? With many companies’ online marketing efforts, there are many people responsible for driving traffic but virtually no one responsible for converting that traffic into revenue. As social media channels further fragment online traffic, companies must not ignore conversions. […]

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